Before anything: where the dock goes
The docking station decides more of the installation than the boundary does, and moving it later means redoing the wire.
It wants: a flat, level spot; power within the cable length the maker supplies rather than the length you wish it had; a straight approach of a couple of metres so the machine can line up; and shade if you can manage it, because a dock in full sun ages hard and a machine parked in it does too.
It does not want to be at the end of a narrow passage, in the lowest corner where water collects, or against a wall the machine has to squeeze past.
Walking the garden first
Before laying anything, walk the lawn and note four things.
Narrow passages between areas. Every maker states a minimum width for its own machine, and a passage under it is a section the robot will never reach. Widening the grass strip by ten centimetres now is easier than discovering it in June.
Slopes, particularly at boundaries. A machine turning on a gradient is where traction is lost, and a slope that meets the edge is harder than a bank in the middle.
Things that must not be touched: a pond, a drop, a gravel bed the colour of dry grass, a flower border the machine will happily drive into.
Anything loose that a machine will find: a hose end, a toy, a low washing line prop.
Laying a boundary
For a wire machine, the maker’s stated distance from a wall, a bed and a hard edge is not a suggestion — it is what stops the machine hitting things, and each of those distances is different.
Peg it, do not bury it, for the first season. The layout will be wrong somewhere, and a pegged wire is a ten-minute correction where a buried one is turf lifting.
Round the corners slightly. A sharp corner is a spot the machine turns hard and scuffs the cable.
Use proper waterproof connectors at every join. A twisted joint in wet ground is a fault that appears next spring and looks like a failing robot.
For a wire-free machine, the equivalent work is the mapping run and the no-go zones, and the same rule applies: expect to redo it once you have watched the machine work.
The first week
Watch it. The machine will find the things you missed, and it will find them repeatedly.
Correct as you go: move a peg, widen a passage, add a zone. A machine that has been corrected three times in its first week is a machine that then runs for a season.
Through the season
The blades are consumables with a short life — much shorter than owners expect, and the makers say so in their own manuals. A machine with worn blades tears rather than cuts, and the lawn whitens exactly as it does behind a blunt rotary mower.
The dock contacts collect grit and need wiping. A machine that returns and fails to charge is usually this.
The wire gets cut, in spring, by a spade. Locating the break is the one job nobody enjoys, and it is the argument for knowing where the wire runs.
What this site can tell you
The robot pages here print the navigation method, whether a wire is required, the stated slope, the cutting width, the guaranteed sound power level and what the maker says about rain and about its own garage. What they do not do is state that a machine is safe around animals — they report what the manufacturer claims.
The questions that keep coming in
How long does a first installation take?
An afternoon for a simple garden with a wire, less for a wire-free machine on open ground, and a weekend for a fragmented garden with passages and beds. The variable is the perimeter and the obstacles, never the area.
Should I set it to mow every day?
Start with the maker’s default schedule and adjust from what you see. A robot’s finish comes from cutting little and often; a machine allowed out too rarely is a machine trying to take too much at once, which is the one thing its cutting system cannot do.
What about the edges?
No robot cuts to a hard boundary. Plan for a strip you will do with shears or a strimmer, and lay the boundary so that strip is as narrow and as accessible as possible.
Last reviewed 26 September 2026